The browser wars —

Yes, people still browse Ars with Lynx, AOL 9.0, and “Nutscrape”

In related news, the dial-up modem lives.

Ars readers, you're a hardy bunch. Neither rain nor snow nor dial-up modems nor outdated Web browsers deter you from visiting the site, and we approve of the pioneer spirit this must take.

In January 2013, 0.1 percent of our audience connected via dial-up modem. A full download of the front page typically runs around 1 megabyte—far smaller than some similar tech sites, but still a hefty lift for dial-up users.

Only 0.1 percent of Ars visitors are on dial-up, not even showing up on this graph.

Well, unless they're using Lynx, which someone is in fact doing; Ars has served 22 pageviews to the text-based Web browser this month. Is that you, Richard Stallman?

(Note: this is a joke, since Richard Stallman does not generally "look at Web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites operated for or by the GNU Project, FSF or me. I fetch Web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program [see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git] that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a Web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly." What could be simpler?)

Ars Technica, as seen on the Lynx Web browser.

Indeed, Ars sees just about every browser ever created, including AOL 9.0, Netscape 4.01, and ridiculously primitive versions of Internet Explorer. Someone with a sense of a fun and a loathing for Netscape even visited the site this month with the user-agent string "Nutscrape 1.0."

While the most common single configuration for visitors is a new version of Google Chrome running over a high-speed link, let's take a moment to salute our Lynx-using, dial-up having, nut-scraping visitors as well.

Promoted Comments

This article I know was meant to be funny, but it made me cry. Because where I work an older (read: ancient) VIP (read: name dropping CEO) individual has been moaning that her Win98 using some ancient version of IE can't access certain features of our website.

I'm not in IT, but the website belongs to my department, and I'm the closest we have to an IT person, and so I'm under tons of pressure to prove how everything we want will be able to be used on anything ever invented to look at the web ever.

I'm thinking of submitting reports with ARPANET compatibility studies to show how "seriously" I took this project. "See? I made our site work on the oldest version of the internet EVER! So if she can't see it, then the problem is on HER end."

I fetch Web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a Web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly.

I fetch Web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a Web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly.

This article I know was meant to be funny, but it made me cry. Because where I work an older (read: ancient) VIP (read: name dropping CEO) individual has been moaning that her Win98 using some ancient version of IE can't access certain features of our website.

I'm not in IT, but the website belongs to my department, and I'm the closest we have to an IT person, and so I'm under tons of pressure to prove how everything we want will be able to be used on anything ever invented to look at the web ever.

I'm thinking of submitting reports with ARPANET compatibility studies to show how "seriously" I took this project. "See? I made our site work on the oldest version of the internet EVER! So if she can't see it, then the problem is on HER end."

That was me in the lynx browser. Attempting to read Ars during work hours without looking like I was reading Ars during work hours...

Cool, I was just thinking someone was specifying lynx as the user agent for wget or curl to make it easier when scraping. You really can't trust those strings completely, though most people don't bother spoofing.

edit:

team:abunai wrote:

Hahah, I'm the one that was using Lynx!

Sometimes I don't want to browse things at work, so I ssh into my home machine and browse with lynx.

I remember using Lynx - at the dullest point in my career - so as not to attract attention too much at work. It was fun realizing how my favourite websites were "optimizing" their PageRank with bordeline practices.

This was actually the thing I disliked most about the most recent site redesign, I had to switch to firefox for reading Ars.

I still use lynx preferrencially to FireFox, but the number of sites I can do that with keeps shrinking.

Though, actually... Someone at Ars has been working on it, and it is actually more usable now than it was, the next page button actually works!

I might go back to lynx to ars again! (Though, links to the images might be nice, lynx can be configured to launch an image viewer when you select one, and sometimes the pictures are pretty important to the story.)

This article I know was meant to be funny, but it made me cry. Because where I work an older (read: ancient) VIP (read: name dropping CEO) individual has been moaning that her Win98 using some ancient version of IE can't access certain features of our website.

I'm not in IT, but the website belongs to my department, and I'm the closest we have to an IT person, and so I'm under tons of pressure to prove how everything we want will be able to be used on anything ever invented to look at the web ever.

I'm thinking of submitting reports with ARPANET compatibility studies to show how "seriously" I took this project. "See? I made our site work on the oldest version of the internet EVER! So if she can't see it, then the problem is on HER end."

Today I've used IE8, iOS Safari and the BBOS webkit. I think in totalality of 2012 I used the aforementioned, plus IE 7, 9 and 10 and Windows Phone 7 IE, Firefox 3.x, 7 and 8, and, of course, elinks. The only trouble I run into is the login interface. For some reason elinks won't allow me to log in. Something about your setup prevents it from working. I can login to the forum interface however. Tabbing through every hyperlink is irritating though. Touch integration would be helpful in that regard.

I think my favorite "old" browser that I've used on Ars was Firebird 0.9 on an old SGI. That was amazing to see that it actually worked.